OUR new Chancellor of the Exchequer concluded her first major speech in that role by saying "there is no time to waste". I wish she would make her words consistent with her actions, because she had just spent the previous 20 minutes or so saying absolutely nothing that we had not already heard during the election campaign, and she dragged a whole pile of her new Cabinet colleagues along to hear her do so. This was time-wasting of the very highest order.
Reeves, when it came down to it, said she was going to do three things during this speech.
First of all, she said she was not going to spend any money unless growth permitted it. But, even if she delivers growth at the rate that Labour did between 1997 and 2009 instead of the dire rate achieved by the Tories between 2010 and 2023, she might increase growth by about 0.6% a year and, as a result, raise less than £7bn of extra tax per annum, or maybe £35 billion over the life of this parliament. That means that there is no hope that anything her government will do will deliver growth over the next five years, given that this is hardly enough to deal with the outstanding repairs bill the Tories left behind. In that case, this is a plan for austerity, not growth, however she describes it.
Instead, she says growth will come from freeing up planning law, over which she has no real control in Scotland and Wales. What seems very likely when she says this is that she has bought into the beliefs of the far-right think tanks in London on this issue, all of which have been promoting this supposed route to growth for years because they think it means tearing up government regulation. They’re right to do so. That’s exactly what Reeves intends to do.
Farewell to the green belt and the protection of England’s green and pleasant land then. Scotland will do well to avoid this, even given all the problems that we know already exist in Scottish planning laws. And whilst I admit that if this delivers more onshore wind in England I will be pleased, maybe someone should tell her that the National Grid has not got the capacity to let any of that new energy production be connected into the energy distribution system for many years. Reeves’s thinking is a very long way from being joined up as yet.
Third, she promised she would unlock new private sector investment. To achieve this goal, she has turned to Canadian, Sir Mark Carney. He was previously the Governor of the Bank of England.
He has precisely no experience of any significance in delivering productive investment in an economy, because that is not what any central banker (which he is) has ever done. But apparently, he is the person to create our National Wealth Fund. I think we can safely say that this will be all about financial engineering in that case, and an excess of financial engineering is precisely why this country is already in the mess it is in. We most certainly do not need any more of it. Just like GB Energy is not an energy company, but is instead going to be a state-backed private equity fund, so too is the national wealth fund going to be another thing of exactly the same sort. It will deliver wealth for the City of London, but precisely no one else.
In fairness, I should add that Reeves was also very keen to suggest during her speech that Labour will supply stability to the economy. No one, as yet, knows what she means by this, but by her actions I think we can presume that this means that nothing of any significance that might upset anyone with financial power in the UK will change if it doing so would be to their detriment. So, there will be no new taxes. There will be no new regulation. And whatever has failed us to date – and it clearly has – will be allowed to carry on doing so. "Stability as change" is, in this context, very much about reinforcing the status quo of power in the UK, and its location in the City of London.
So, what will all this do for Scotland? I think it fair to say that the answer is as close to nothing as it could get. But then, Labour has never thought about Scotland and its age-old pattern of not doing so is one of the many things it has no intention of changing.
I have seen the plan for the next, dismal, five years and am left very cold by the prospect of what is to come.
